Saturday, 2 March 2013

House
in Lockland, Ohio. [Shows photographer's shadow. Hole punched in
negative by Farm Security Administration staff to indicate negative
should not be printed.]: photo by Carl Mydans, December 1935 for U.S. Resettlement
Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information
Collection, Library of Congress)

Carl Mydans' blight -- a black hole

(letting your shadow fall across the image

involving yourself in the situation)

punched in the negative

Cheap partly-constructed houses lacking water and sewage, Lockland,
Ohio. [Image not circulated, because it shows photographer's shadow.]:
photo by Carl Mydans, December 1935 for U.S. Resettlement
Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information
Collection, Library of Congress)

Thanks Steve, lovely to glimpse through overcast here that sunlit green shoulder of the ridge, there: all these details happening for the first and last time, over and over...

Over these five years of slowly working through the 160,000 black and white negatives in the FSA files, I've grown increasingly interested in the curious archival "negation" of some of the negatives, sometimes by strike-through markings, sometimes by the black-dot method -- invariably the negatives are designated as "not for circulation" whenever the photographer's shadow appears.

But of course the shadows remind us that somebody had to be there, setting up the composition, taking the picture.